Ed Renwick, a self-described political junkie who was a professor, pollster, pundit and mentor to people who wanted a practical guide to the rough-and-tumble realm of Louisiana politics, died Friday at his New Orleans home. He was 81.

As director of Loyola University’s Institute of Politics for more than three decades, Renwick showed how the game was played in a series of sessions before men and women — politicians, would-be politicians and people who wanted to be informed observers — who had to interview to become fellows of the institute and then pay tuition.

Under Renwick’s leadership, IOP, as it is known, became an implicit requirement for anyone who wants to know how the political process works in Louisiana. “It’s clear that the program has become as much a part of New Orleans’ political landscape as the occasional criminal charge,” political columnist Stephanie Grace, an IOP fellow, wrote in The Times-Picayune in 1999.

“He made it so interesting,” said Katherine Gelderman, a fellow and longtime IOP board member. “IOP started off as a best-kept secret. He didn’t seek to advertise it so much, and now we have to have a waiting list.”

“This is no stodgy political science class,” wrote Grace, now a columnist for The Times-Picayune | New Orleans Advocate. “It’s a primer on political reality, what you should know and what you have to do to survive the wild world of Louisiana government.”

That wasn’t all that Renwick did. He also was a political science professor at Loyola, a pollster and a political commentator on WWL-TV.

“For most of the last 50 years, there are few political events in the state or the city that didn’t have Ed Renwick’s fingerprints on them,” said Peter Burns, a political science professor at Soka University of America in Aliso Viejo, California, who considered Renwick a mentor.

But Renwick had a life beyond politics. He and his wife, Polly Renwick, collected African and contemporary American art, and he enjoyed travel and fine food and wine.

“Every time Ed walked into a New Orleans restaurant, half the people in the place would point and whisper and say, ‘There’s Ed Renwick,’’’ Burns said. “The other half would get up from their table and ask him who was going to win the election and which bottle of wine they should order.”

Edward Francis Renwick was born on June 26, 1938, in Joliet, Illinois. He earned an undergraduate degree at Georgetown University and master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Arizona.

He came to Louisiana in the 1960s to research his doctoral dissertation on the Long dynasty. He planned to stay only a year, but, he said in a Times-Picayune interview in 2008, “It was hard to leave. This place is heaven for a political junkie.”

Renwick taught at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette) from 1963 to 1967 and at the University of New Orleans from 1967 until he moved to Loyola in 1970.

At Loyola, he gravitated toward IOP, which had been established in 1969 as a reform-minded program that would also help more minorities and women get elected to office. Renwick worked with Jim Chubbuck, IOP’s first director, until he succeeded Chubbuck in the mid-1970s.

At Loyola, and in his work as an analyst and pollster, Renwick was known for being knowledgeable and understated.

“He was a very no-nonsense guy,” said David Marcello, an IOP fellow and board member. “People who listened to him for his analysis, people who hired him as a pollster knew that they were getting the straight stuff.

“He was not lacking in confidence in his own judgments, but he didn’t feel like he needed to get up on a soapbox and orate about them. He gave you the facts, and what you did with them was up to you.”

“Ed survived because he was so good,” said Clancy DuBos, a Gambit columnist and former IOP board member who succeeded Renwick as WWL-TV’s on-air political commentator.

“He was never part of anybody’s administration,” DuBos said. “He was never partisan. He was always accurate, so people always sought him out. He wasn’t a predictor. He never tried to make policy; he just gave the numbers.”

“He was a man of great integrity,” said John Bullard, former director of the New Orleans Museum of Art, where Renwick was a longtime trustee.

“You say the name Ed Renwick, and it gives credence to what we (at IOP) are doing,” Gelderman said.

On an informal level, Renwick “had a wonderful way of conversing,” she said. “I loved sitting next to him at a party because I wanted to know everything he had to say.”

Renwick’s dry sense of humor was evident in Grace’s account of the opening remarks he made before each new class of IOP fellows: "Take a look around you. Some of the people you see will be elected. … Some of them will be indicted."

Each IOP term runs from mid-autumn until mid-spring. Admission is open to anyone except current office holders.

Among the alumni are former U.S. Sen. David Vitter; former U.S. Rep. Bob Livingston; former New Orleans City Councilwoman Suzanne Haik Terrell; JoAnn Clevenger, owner of the Upperline Restaurant; former Jefferson Parish District Attorney John Mamoulides; civil rights leader Oretha Castle Haley; Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times; and Vance Vaucresson, president of the Gentilly sausage-making company bearing his surname.

In 1999, he was inducted into the Louisiana Political Hall of Fame.

Renwick retired in 2008. IOP has established a lecture series bearing his name.

His successor, Tommy Screen, also is Loyola’s director of government and legal affairs.

“When I came in for a transition meeting with him, it was obvious that this was a labor of love,” Screen said. “My initial impression is: How is this guy involved in politics, because he is so nice and so kind, and everyone knows politics is a blood sport? ... He was as nice a gentleman and as personable as you could meet. ... I feel when folks get older, they get ornery. Ed was just the opposite.”

In addition to his wife, survivors include a brother, Robert M. Renwick of Phoenix.

Lake Lawn Metairie Funeral Home is in charge of funeral arrangements, which are incomplete.